Hehe  NO  SECRET'S  HERE !!!!  -humm NAZI-POLOSEE  ??? ,yea.Yea,  YEAAAA    Transparent our asses  ;0     ...tingly  baby .Tingly ...all over :)                                     

EFF Gets Secret Interpretation Of FISA Spying Law... And It's Almost Entirely Redacted

from the but-not-completely dept

We've talked about the absolute ridiculousness of having a secret interpretation of a US law on surveillance such that the law actually means something different than what most people (including the politicians voting on it) think it means -- and yet the secret law remains in place for entirely secret reasons. The EFF, as part of an ongoing dispute over all of this, had submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request concerning some testimony on that secret interpretation, and it got back a "relevant" document... which as almost entirely redacted. Here's a sample page.
Much of it is blocked as "non-responsive" but the "responsive" section is basically entirely blacked out. The only text of the entire document that's available (other than the cover page) is:

The Government has provided copies of the opinions and the filings by the Government to this Committee, and the Government will continue to inform the Committee about developments in this manner.

It's ridiculous to continue arguing -- as Senator Dianne Feinstein has done repeatedly -- that there is no secret law here. She's being deliberately misleading, confusing "the law" with "the legislation." The legislation is the text as written by the legislature, but "the law" includes specific rulings by courts on the legislation. The legislation may be public, but the law is not when the rather important interpretations of the legislation remain completely redacted.